Good Williams Hunting...?

I had lunch with my friend Dale from Colorado yesterday. I don't call him "Dale from Colorado" as a moniker but it makes a good sentence. Dale is my kind of guy. In many ways, he's the guy I want to be. He plays guitar, is always in a good mood, rides dirt bikes, and hunts elk with a handmade longbow. Compound bows are for sissies and cowards, according to Dale. I've never heard him say this mind you, but it sounds like something he might say, so I'll pretend he did. He reminds me of Ted Nugent but with a clean mouth and a much less guilty conscience.

I've never been able to hunt and I've always felt a little lesser-than because of it. My cousins, uncles, in-laws, and friends all hunt, but I don't. I'm not sure why, but I just can't stomach it. I can't help but be a little jealous, though, when I hear my buddies repeating their epic tales of tree-stands, of deer camps far away, and stories about duck blinds and defecating in the woods standing up. It's as if I've missed out on some required male rite-of-passage. Some may ask, Randy, are you some closeted P.E.T.A. sympathizer? Nothing could be further from the truth. Well, there were those years in college when I slapped Greenpeace stickers on everything, but that was more of an attempt to seem "edgy" and "liberal." I'm pretty certain, though, that it just came off "annoying" and "pretentious." But no. I don't do that anymore. In fact, my new favorite t-shirt says, "Meat is Murder. Tasty Tasty Murder." I like my steak medium rare, have owned several handguns, and think vegans are pasty and self-righteous. Sort of like the French without iron and protein.

When I was around twelve, I shot a mockingbird in our backyard with my Daisy Red Rider pump action BB gun. It was sitting there on the phone wire, minding its own business, perhaps thinking of that juicy grub he had for lunch. I took dead aim (literally) and blew its head off. The visual of the thing swinging upside down, muscles still clinging to the wire, gave me the heebie jeebies and kept me from sleeping for a week. Plus, since I'd killed the Texas state bird, I'd also committed my first crime (I was a nervous child after that). A few years later, I shot a rabbit on my grandparent's farm with a .22 rifle. The thing let out a yelp that I swear sounded like an infant crying. Done. That was it. I haven't shot a creature since. Fishing? Different story. I've fished all my life and some of my favorite memories are from my Uncle Randall's house (yep, I'm named after him) on Lake Conway. On the grand scale of pain, though, fishing is much more torturous than hunting, yet I have no problem yanking a crooked hook through the lip of a fat crappie and dragging it into the boat.

If they only made deer hooks, I think I could do it.

(rw)

Comments

[Kelly]

I just found out a couple days ago that my neighbor went out skeet shooting with her husband. She's a sweet old lady, so to think of her with a shotgun in the first place, is really quite frightening. But as it turns out, she shot and killed a mockingbird not realizing what she had shot! Oops!

[Doug]

LOL !!!
Nice...he doesn't play guitar though.. ;-)